Tag Archives: Holland

Foreword: My friends occasionally warn me about appearing to be too friendly toward Russia, as if such were possible.

So why do I focus so much on Russia? Five reasons come to mind:

1-I have studied Russian language and literature for most of my adult life, on both the undergraduate and graduate levels. During my studies, I came to love and admire the Russians based on what I have learned about them. They are for the most part courageous, intelligent, sensitive, honest, persevering and long suffering, to mention but a few of their merits.

2-In recent years, I have watched the Western world deteriorate to a situation that by now seems beyond repair. There is hatred between left and right, between the races, between Mexicans and US citizens, between Muslims and Christians, and there is a press and political class that encourage this, and that foments hatred of the more mild-mannered Muslims while embracing the more intolerant and violent ones, as I showed here. The press and politicians constantly stir up wars that we inevitably lose or that destroy whole nations and regions, and the elites are at a loss to articulate why (although it ought to be obvious why they do this, as I explained here). There is no change in sight. In comparison to Russia, the latter seems like a paradise, even to the most objective observer.

3-To keep up with the language, I read almost all the speeches and interviews delivered by Putin in the original Russian. I also have read his biography in his native tongue. It is no exaggeration to say I feel as if I had known him all my life and I know how he will react in each situation. In diplomacy, he seems to be heeding the words of Christ.

4-The most formidable danger facing the world is nuclear war and the media and political class seem hell-bent on starting a war with Russia. From what I have read, partly in the Russian press, I am convinced that either of China or Russia could destroy the entire US in a matter of minutes with their hardware (which is why I posted this).

5-Of all the issues that the msm and politicians lie about and distort, all things touching Russia are by far the most distorted and misunderstood. I would be a bad person if I snoozed through this barrage of lies and false narratives, and, given all the research I have done and my educational background, I simply can’t do that.

After all, why would someone with years of research under his belt in precisely this life or death issue not want to counter the obvious lies about Russia? Should I care that some racist Westerners will think ill of me and call me a pinko or a commie – even though the West is adopting the model of the USSR while Russia has learned its lesson about tyranny the hard way and has backtracked to a conservative, sane and healthy way of life and public policies?

I had told you this before, based solely on an analysis of the inane accusations by the “intelligence” agencies, here and here.

The breaking news about the CIA is that Wikileaks has received a data trove proving they have been using Russian software and malware to create fake “evidence” that the Russians are hacking US officials.

“The release of the CIA’s hacking tools is a victory not for the American public but for Russia.”

In other words, in Slate’s view, making the public aware of the truth is not a victory for the people? So is it a victory for them to be uninformed? I guess so. Moreover, calling it exclusively a victory for Russia implies we have lost something. So clearing the path to a detente with Russia, a nuclear power, is a bad thing – no matter that it might be a step to avoiding a nuclear holocaust?

Wired goes even further, saying that even though the CIA had tools to fake Russian hacking, there is no indication that they used them.
Right. So if a man with a stocking over his head is carrying a bag of burglar tools and is standing outside a freshly-broken window of your home, don’t jump to conclusions and call the police or anything.

But ok, let’s suspend disbelief and say it does not prove the Russians did not hack US officials. But Wired and the rest of the CIA hit men journos omit to tell us what it does prove: That all the hard “evidence” of Russian hacking is now null and void, because the only “evidence” was Russian characters in docs supposedly left by the “hackers” but now we know that this is not proof it was the Russians and not the CIA itself, which previously had given non-credible evidence, such as the scope of the data dump and the “motive” – as if Bernie Sanders supporters had no motive whatsoever to leak this information to the public. If the CIA has no evidence, how is this undocumented theory of a Russian hack a print-worthy story?

The CIA’s claim that they found Russian “fingerprints” all over the files that were left by the hackers, including characters from a Russian keyboard, was a stupid thing to say because the Russians are a lot smarter than to leave that kind of trail. And the Russians don’t lie to the press in ways that can easily be detected. (If you compare the Russian press with the Western press, you will see that the latter often prints things that are later disproven and presents viewpoints not supported by the facts, as evidenced by the Russian hacking narrative). If you follow the Russian press, eg, Sputnik, Russia Today, TASS, Ria Novosti, etc, you therefore do not see obvious exaggeration and lies. Ask yourself: Why would a country with almost no public debt need to lie about its economy, for example, to a country with a $20 trillion debt? Why would it need to lie about its foreign relations when it does not start color revolutions and create chaos throughout the world? Why would it lie about its treatment of its citizens when no scandal has ever broken over spying on its own people, or when no riots occur in its cities or when its president has as high as 85% approval in the polls (which never happened in the US, ever!)? Etc. Observant students of Russia and Putin and their modus operandi know the Russians did not hack our officials. So when Putin said several months back that the Russian Federation does not interfere in elections of other countries, he was telling the truth. How did I know? Because, as I explained in my articles Putinology 101 and The Putin Principle, Russia has long stated as part of its public policy statement and publicity program that, unlike the West, they do not meddle in other countries’ internal affairs, for example, as the US did at the Maidan in Kiev, causing a bloody illegal coup that led to an ongoing civil war and wrecked the country socially and economically. Meddling is exclusively Western MO. Russia must avoid all appearances of meddling, especially in US internal politics, because non-interference is what they have been trying to promote throughout the world, creating a stark contrast to the US and showing the public that their hands-off policy really works by establishing trust and respect in foreign relations. So far this policy has led to excellent relations with even the most difficult states, including NATO member Turkey, which, despite the Turkish shootdown of the Russian fighter over Syria, now has better relations with Russia than with any Western country (Holland just recently refused to let Erdogan’s plane land at a Dutch airport; Merkel refuses to let Erdogan campaign among Turkish residents of Germany). The iron-clad Russian non-interference principle is why Putin was very circumspect in his description of Trump, calling him yarki, which when applied to persons, only means roughly “colorful,” not “bright” as it was wrongly translated in the Western media (BTW, I am a technical translator by trade and Russian is one of my languages). Trump foolishly said Putin had called him a genius. Hardly! Trump’s over-the-top claims have contributed to this own downfall by creating the illusion that Putin supported his campaign, even though Putin repeatedly said he did not support either candidate and will work with either one that is elected.

Russia has in Vladimir Putin one of the most gifted diplomats and statesmen who ever lived. The US is at best in the hands of bungling amateurs. And that is putting it diplomatically. After all, I would not want a Russophobic Neocon saying I am a Kremlin stooge.

I recently had a complaint about a comment of mine on my private forum (applicants may apply at zoilandon@msn.com) regarding Stratfor, which I said was a propaganda outlet. A reader was very upset and said that he had worked with companies that paid money to subscribe to Stratfor for information that helped them plan economic strategy. The implication was that they could not be a propaganda outlet if serious companies paid them for hard to find information. I do want to point out that the msm are also charged with being a propaganda arm of the US government. This does not mean they are literally paid hard cash for government-favorable reporting. It goes much deeper than that. What I call “propaganda” is what we call the oficialista viewpoint here in Latin America, for example. It is a viewpoint that is inhaled with the air that people, especially journalists, breathe. Anyone expressing a contrarian viewpoint is persona non grata in government circles and risks not getting invited to official press conferences – or worse. Thus there is a constant inflow and outflow of the officialist viewpoint at outlets like Stratfor. No one has to bribe or pay them to parrot the official party line. It is in their blood stream.

The Stratfor article I was commenting on was one in which the author was fretting that Latvia had a pro-Russian political party that was rapidly growing, raising “concerns” as to what Russia might eventually do.

Of course, the real concern for those who like democratic systems would be that some tyrannical outsider might try to force Latvia to remain aligned with the West despite its desire not to – just as the East of Ukraine is being forced to go along with the wishes of Western Ukraine and the EU-US-NATO bloc. (And yet, Scotland gets to hold a referendum and no one in the Western world accuses them of illegal behavior for breaking away from a sovereign country, ie, the UK).

The Western press, whether a for-profit geopolitical analysis site like Stratfor or the msm, never misses a chance to focus on what evil deed Russia may do but almost never focuses on what might make an EU member like Latvia want spontaneously to align with Russia and eventually drop out of the EU. The real issue, left unmentioned, is not what Russia will do but the domino effect of countries like Latvia harboring anti-EU Russia-friendly parties which are growing in leaps and bounds. These include the UK, Holland and France, countries that if they should drop out – or I should say when they drop out, will completely sink the entire EU grand projet. (Don’t worry, though. Your favorite pay-to-read site will never annoy you with that piece of trivia). Once the EU falls, as it must, that will not be Russia’s fault. If Russia fills the trade vacuum, that is hardly an act of war. It is what we used to call the free market back when there was one.

But the folks at Stratfor think that the Latvian development is about Russian misbehavior.

And you know what irks me no end?

In stark contrast to the very localized development in Latvia, which is none of our business, there is a worldwide development that is about Russia – and also about China and eventually the rest of the BRICS countries – a development that is our business and the business of Stratfor subscribers, like it or not, and that development is dedollarization, which if the msm is doing its job of blacking it out properly, you probably have never heard of.

Dedollarization, the movement that could destroy the US economy, is well underway and includes not only the 5 BRICS members but also Japan, some African countries and some European countries, like France (see my sampler of foreign press articles below). Why France? Because a French bank was soaked a world record fine a while back for trading with some US-blacklisted countries and they are getting fed up with the bullying.

Hey, Stratfor, want something to warn your subscribers about?

How about warning them about dedollarization and the US’s suicidal practice of imposing gargantuan fines on foreign banks at the whim of the US government? Or the practice of provoking Russia by siding with known fascists in former COMECON countries that they still want to trade with. Dedollarization is the chickens coming home to roost. Oh, but that’s embarrassing for the US elites who implement these suicidal policies.

Besides, Russophobia, a popular form of racism, is all the rage in Washington, and Russia is the whipping boy du jour. More to the point, in a country where Russophobia is the official fare, it would be embarrassing to admit that Putin turned the tables on the dull witted Western elites with a brilliant answer to the sanctions against Russia, namely, dedollarization of international trade – the use of currencies other than the dollar to transact.

It is vital for you to know something that the msm will never tell you: there are 2 reasons that the USD is still worth money:

1. Since the Bretton Woods agreement, the world is obliged to use the USD in international trade; and

2. The US military.

Dedollarization is the start of a process that will slowly erode these 2 factors.

With all this in mind, I went to the Stratfor site to see how many articles they had relating to dedollarization, a phenomenon poised to kill the USD and hence bring hyperinflation to the US. (Dear Stratfor readers: don’t you suppose a bankrupted USA full of hungry people might be just a wee bit more important than some folks in the mini-country of Latvia who prefer trading with a stable country like Russia – which has a capitalist economy without the impediment of Keynesianism and whose debt, unlike ours, is only a modest fraction of GDP?).

I can’t tell you how unsurprised I was to find the following using “dedollarization” as the search term at the Stratfor site:

Argentina and Brazil plan to de-dollarize commerce in their countries in the first part of 2008 to…

That’s it. So if I am a Stratfor reader, I am led to believe that dedollarization is a South American phenomenon, confined to Argentina and Brazil. Meanwhile Europe is teetering on the brink of dedollarizaton, African countries are dedollarizing, and China, Japan and Russia have already taken that route in major international transactions. Now remember: Stratfor charges money to its subscribers for refusing to give them vital information that the long term investor can hardly be without!

But you are not alone, Stratfor. Guess how many articles the writer-for-hire Wall Street Journal had relating to dedollarization when I performed that search? Ready for this? Here ya go:

SEARCH

Advanced Search

Sorry, there are no results for your search query, please try another search.

ROFL! I love this stuff!

For good measure, I decided I might as well try the pay-to-read New York Times. Since they peddle these big thick wads that take whole forests for a week’s worth of news, why they would surely carry something about dedollarization, wouldn’t they?

“Dedollarization has been a very slow process,” Peru’s central bank president, Oscar Dancourt, said. “But we’re making progress, we’re on the …

So if we trust Stratfor and NYT, dedollarization is only happening in South America. And if we trust WSJ, it doesn’t exist. Nothing to worry about. Certainly not the nail-biting that Latvia’s growing anti-EU party will cause those Stratfor subscribers, who apparently all hold mostly EU bonds in their portfolios and whose worst nightmare is a coup in Latvia. The Russkies are coming! The Russkies are coming!

Now, if you don’t like the word “propaganda,” don’t use it. In fact, you may, if you like, send me your suggestions for a word that better fits an international news analysis site that keeps vital information away from the reader while plying them with news about the internal politics of one of the smallest countries in the EU – and spinning even that tidbit to blame it on Russia, the whipping boy of the officialistas in Washington, DC. But just because our government is running a hate-Russia campaign does not mean that Stratfor is deliberately giving Washington what it wants, does it? Of course not. It could be just a remarkable coincidence. Yeah.

So omitting that harsh word “propaganda,” would you at least admit that the media, even the subscription-only media that soak you plenty for their gems of hard-to-find knowledge that is all over the internet for free, are at least keeping important news – and I’d have to say the most important news – safely away from your eyes?

Finally, for those who never heard of dedollarization (how would you know from the msm if even outlets specialized in international economic news don’t carry the story?), I will admit that my information on the subject originally came from sites like The Economic Collapse, FedUpUSA and Zero Hedge. I trust these sites because, for one thing, they quote sources, and for another, they don’t sound like a broken record cut in Washington. Nonetheless, for the hard core doubters, I was challenged to do my own search of the world press on dedollarization, just to make sure you wouldn’t think I make stuff up. Below is a list of links amounting to no more than about 1% of the dazzling array of foreign articles on dedollarization that I found in German, French, Spanish, English and Chinese – and I’m talking about the real dedollarization, not obscure events localized in South America but an economic freight train bearing down on you and me as I type. I skipped Russian this time even though that is one of my primary sources for this information. That’s because the American public is trained like Pavlov’s dogs to reject all things Russian and there is little point sending the reader to, say, Russia Direct or the like because, unlike our reliable msm, Russian news is pure “propaganda,” right, Sheeple?

Oh, and did I mention that, despite the fact that Stratfor charged readers for its “news” report on Latvia, that story was all over the internet, here, for example, and wouldn’t have cost the subscribers a dime to get all the details. Without the racist anti-Russian propaganda.

Germany:

I first searched the word for dedollarization, Entdollariserung.

My goal was to find sources that did not quote the usual US blogs on this subject because, while I personally have the highest regard for the 3 blogs mentioned above, the elites want us to believe that only “bona fide” sites like WSJ or NYT are worth quoting. So while some foreign sites run translations of Tyler Durden or Michael Snyder on this subject, I chose to skip those and picked sites like this one:

The below German language article cites ITAR-TASS quoting the Russian Central Bank office and also quoting Vladimir Putin in Shanghai following a talk with Xi Jinping announcing closer cooperation between the central banks of Russia and China. (I found references to this well-known conference in several languages).

How about a French site discussing how BRICS countries and France are weighing the possibility of dedollarizing due in part to the draconian fines imposed by the US on French banks (for doing things that are legal in France!)?

Quote: The official said that the economy is in a course of stability and there is a set of measures that have been taken aimed at the maintenance and sustainability of the framework which is the process of de-dollarisation of the economy, started four years ago.

El País, In Spanish, reporting directly on meetings of BRICS in Fortaleza, Brazil, where dedollarization was being planned:

I think you can see the advantage of having access to the multilingual press. Monolingualism is a bit of a hindrance these days if you want to know what is going on in the rest of the world that might just affect you. Especially if you are a subscriber to “specialized” news sites like Stratfor, Wall Street Journal or New York Times, that seem to have trouble reading any language.

Euro-Left creates martyr, boosts Wilders in polls

By Donald Hank

De Volkskrant was, to my knowledge, the first news outlet to report that Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders was planning to make the anti-Koran movie Fitna and Laigle’s Forum was the first news site in the nation to present a translation of that news with comments, later following it up with the news that the movie had come out on YouTube.

At the time, and ever since then, de Volkskrant has allowed all news items on Wilders to be filtered through the highly biased viewpoints of politicians and dignitaries who opposed Wilders and marginalized him as an anti-immigrant rabble rouser.

Today de Volkskrant turned a corner, reporting on a poll by the market research company TNS NIPO showing that Geert Wilders has picked up in polls since his recent arrest for “hate” and his expulsion from Britain for “security” reasons. Not surprisingly, the new supporters of Wilders’ Freedom Party (PVV) tend to be higher educated than the previous average Wilders supporter.

The article states (my translation):

“In the Second Chamber elections in 2006, 9% of the PVV voters had higher educational degrees. That is now 13%, and among the newcomers, it was in fact 16%… The incomes of the average PVV voters also rose. By living standards, they are increasingly coming to resemble the average Dutch person. ‘The Wilders voter is becoming normalized,’ says Peter Kanne of TNS NIPO.

Volkskrant ascribes the uptick in Wilders’ popularity to his recent martyrdom. A Dutch court recently arraigned Wilders for a “hate” crime based on his showing of Fitna, which puts the Koran in a bad light. Britain also expelled him last week even though he had been invited by British lawmakers to discuss his film.

The Volkskrant also says that a poll by another pollster taken since the TNS NIPO poll show an even further uptick in Wilders’ popularity (my translation):

“The PVV rose in the TNS NIPO poll to 14 votes last week. According to Maurice de Hond, the PVV has grown to 25 votes, making the PVV in fact the no. 2 party in the Netherlands. TNS NIPO polled before Wilders was barred from entry to England, while De Hond polled after that. This explains the difference for the most part. Since 2006, freedom of speech is named as a new reason for voting for Wilders. Kanne: ‘the issue has been successfully co-opted.’ “

What De Volkskrant didn’t tell you is that TNS NIPO is a leftwing group that has tried in the past-like Volkskrant-to marginalize Wilders. Yet now both are forced to back off from that stance, proving once again that the media around the world are motivated mostly by politics, not by truth.

This story is not about Holland or Europe. It is about human beings and what motivates them universally, and hence it has major implications for America, where a black pastor is now facing a jail sentence for carrying a sign with the words “Jesus loves you and your baby. Let us help” outside an abortion clinic.

Pastor Hoye can take heart from this story about Wilders. As soon as the Left creates martyrs by denying people their God-given freedoms, it automatically pays the price in terms of human responses to their unconscionable actions, greatly advancing the cause of truth and justice.